Have you ever felt like a square peg in the village of round holes? You would think I would feel at home in a group of Baptisty preachers and pastors, but I really do not. There was a dinner at the mission, and i ended up sitting with the recovery people, I just felt more at home.

Then there is the music. i really don’t enjoy listening to much country music. I like Bebo Norman a lot, but the live stuff quite often tosses me into rebellion. There was a very talented man playing trumpet, guitar and singing to a recorded track, but he had that spikey short hair and one of those mustaches that slipped off the upper lip and landed just below his lower lip. If i didn’t look, I could admit he was very talented. I am that jaded. The whole CCM scene has left me being judgmental to all CCM artists and i am sure that is wrong.

They guys in the program told me they liked when I preached. They said the last fellow gave a rousing dissertation on baptismal regeneration. He stated that all “so-called Christians” that believe in baptismal regeneration are going to Hell. He knew that because he had the Holy Spirit and that if you had the Holy Spirit and attended a church that believed in baptismal regeneration you would immediately quit and join his denomination. So much for Steve “theoldadam” and the lovely Church of Christ people who first befriended me. Personally, I put a lot more faith in my Savior than in my denomination or my doctrine.

A lot of pastor meetings really depress me. I was with a friend who was really struggling with a crisis in his ministry and life. We were going to a pray in. On the way there he was rejoicing that he was going to confess and get support for a huge problem, it was so big that he needed the group to help. We circled up and began to pray in order. After one preacher prayed for God to guide the deacons to give him a raise, one prayed for his flock to accept modern music, and another fervently, tearfully, prayed to God for his board to give him permission to rip up the pews, as we all know that souls are best saved by preaching in the round. When it was my friends turn to pray, he said,”pass”. Two months later he left his wife and his two churches and ran off with the gym teacher. I don’t go to those meetings anymore.

I served on a regional board for about two years, we spent most of the time writing and adjusting the bylaws. When i was an organizer I was taught that to take a group out of a coalition, get them working on their bylaws, it renders them useless. I shared this, to no avail. We finished the bylaws, and within a year the structure of the whole thing changed. Throw those bylaws out, start over. I don’t go there anymore.

I fit in at Dayspring! Thank God he gave me a place to hang out and glorify The Lord! I feel at home there. We aren’t much, but we are real.

“They asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, . . . ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.’” Acts 1:6, 8

The disciples could have made a biblical case for their kingdom scenario. But their question “must have filled Jesus with dismay” (Stott, Acts, page 41). They wanted to regain something they had lost (note “restore”). God’s purpose all along and his next step now were both better than they thought. His true kingdom had always been spiritual, and the Holy Spirit was about to come down in unprecedented power.

We long for our kingdoms. We see them in the Bible and tell ourselves they are God’s kingdom. But he has a better way — the power of the Holy Spirit.

Are we smarter than the disciples back then? Shouldn’t we bring our enthusiasms under the judgment of “Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42)? What if we actually got our way?

For example, some of us would like to be the next John Piper or Tim Keller or Mark Driscoll or whoever — a very personal kingdom dream — the way I’ve always wanted to be the next Billy Graham. But God’s plan for you is better. It’s you, the real you, clothed with power from on high (Luke 24:48). The you that you are by creation and redemption is not fundamentally a problem you have to work around but fundamentally a strategy God wants to work through.

“Isaac Hann was a little-known Baptist pastor who served a small church in Loughwood, England, in the mid-18th century. At the close of his ministry the membership of his church numbered twenty-six women and seven men. Underneath the list of members for that year this poignant note appears: ‘These are the men that remain at present, though not above four of these do in any shape keep their places [attend].’

Rev. Hann would be unnoticed today, one of those pastors who never quite ‘made’ it. But when he died at the age of 88, his parishioners placed a commemorative plaque in his honor of the wall of their little meeting house. It reads in part:

Wit sparkled in his pleasing face,
with zeal his heart was fired;
few ministers so humble were,
yet few so much admired.

Ripened for heaven by grace divine,
like autumn fruit he fell;
reader, think not to live so long,
but seek to live as well.”

The second most important book in my life now is the AA big book and that book defines humility as (and I paraphrase this) A clear understanding of who and what we really are , followed by a honest effort to live up to our God given potential . For years I thought my quirky view of the world made me the odd man out .I felt less than the people around me that put material possessions above the well being of their fellow man . So they would amass stuff .Dont get me wrong stuff is nice but Id rather help someone put brakes on their car and get fed a sandwich than charge money for it .Its my understanding that the brakes on Gods Chevy are fine. And from what Ive learned along the way is the best way to serve god is to help make one of his creations journey through life a little easier . I learned that in the most important book in my life a 1959 Gideons King James version of the Holy Bible . I was shown this information in my Bible by a grateful, humble servant of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who just so happens to be the author of this blog .You know him as willohroots I have been blessed by the ability to call him Will , Pastor Will ,that odd Welshman from up the hill and most important of all friend.So who am I, thanks to my brothers and sisters at Dayspring I’m no longer odd man out I’m an odd man in.